Class and Ethnicity in the Canton of Cayambe:

The Roots of Ecuador's Modern Indian Movement

Marc Becker, Ph.D.

Abstract

Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1997

My research examines changes in ideologies of class and ethnicity within rural movements
for social change in Ecuador during the twentieth century. It explores how popular organizations
engaged class analyses and ethnic identities in order to influence strategies of political mobilization among Indigenous and peasant peoples. Although recently ethnicity has come to dominate
Indigenous political discourse, I have discovered that historically the rural masses defended their
class interests, especially those related to material concerns such as land, wages, and work, even
while embracing an ideology of ethnicity. Through the study of land tenure and political
mobilization issues, this project examines the roles of leadership, institutions, economics, and class
relations in order to understand the formation of class ideologies and ethnic politics in Ecuador.

Although various Indigenous revolts occurred during the colonial period, these were
localized and lacked a global vision for social change. In contrast, beginning in the 1920s Indian
organizations emerged which understood that immediate and local solutions would not improve
their situation, but rather that there must be fundamental structural changes in society. Moving
from narrow, local revolts to broad organizational efforts for structural change represented a
profound ideological shift which marks the birth of Ecuador's modern Indian movement.

An examination of how these early organizations and movements developed and operated
elucidates the emergence of subsequent Indigenous organizations. This study utilizes a sequence
of organizing efforts in the Canton of Cayambe in the northern Ecuadorian highlands from the
formation of the first Indigenous sindicatos (peasant unions) in the 1920s to the promulgation of
agrarian reform legislation in 1964 as a case study. This story reveals the demands of Indigenous
movements, the organizational strategies which they implemented to achieve those demands, and
the influence which this history had on the formation of Ecuador's modern Indian movement. It is
the thesis of this study that Ecuador's Indigenous movement has its roots in leftist organizational
efforts, and that its character must be understood as an integral part of that history. In fact, it is
the nature and content of that relationship with the left which has led to Ecuador witnessing
perhaps the strongest Indigenous movement in Latin America in the 1990s.

This book is built on a study of the nature of land tenure relations extracted from
documents at the Archivo Nacional de Historia, the Archivo Historico del Banco Central, and the
records of the Junta Central de Asistencia Pública, all located in Quito, Ecuador. Newspaper
reports from mainstream dailies and small leftist publications provide a wealth of information on
rural protest actions. Although records from early organizations do not exist, their actions are
documented in front-page stories in these newspapers. Finally, published and tape recorded
testimonies and interviews which anthropologists conducted in the 1960s and 1970s with
Indigenous actors who are no longer living provide critical insights into this history of rural
protest actions.